


After Midnight I Am Awake

by furius



Category: The Silmarillion - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furius/pseuds/furius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU in which Aredhel is barely existing, Eol does not exist, and Celegorm wishes he doesn't exist in 2012.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Midnight I Am Awake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thehandsoftime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsoftime/gifts).



I shall live and fall in love, he thought, as his eyes travelled across the headline of the yellowed newspaper. A sinister brown blot obscured the last word, but his own byline was starkly clear and mocking beneath. His muscles started to cramp. He twisted again. The rattling echoed inside the room, but the chains still held tight. Even worse, his head moved perilously further from the ground. Dizzy, he closed his eyes.

"Again?"

The word was very soft, barely a whisper, but he had always prided himself in his hearing, so when suddenly the mechanism whirled to life, he shouted in alarm, or would've, if he could speak.

A strong hand grabbed his arm before he toppled when the catches on his ankles released.

"You are EOL." It wasn't a question, which made the statement strange. Nonetheless, he nodded, flexing his fingers. They were cold and stinging as blood returned to its normal circulation. He had became resigned to the fact that fake names and false IP addresses weren’t enough to preserve anonymity despite his best efforts.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Call me Adalbjorg," his rescuer said without looking at him. Avoiding him, he couldn't help thinking. She was typing out a message to someone. The satellites were still working then.

"Adalbjorg," he repeated to himself. "That's an Icelandic name? You're Icelandic?" he asked, wary. It meant maybe the people of Web Holdings 1964 finally involved themselves. Their servers were powered by geothermal vents and cooled by free arctic winds, but the politics that had ensured their existence had almost certainly required his to disappear unless there was another conflict of interest, either financial or political. He didn't think he had enough friends who could generate a scandal, which made this woman’s presence all the more inexplicable. If she was Icelandic, at least it meant, _probably_ he won't be made to disappear by the more dangerous intelligence agencies with unknown interests. At least she didn’t sound American.

"You could say that," she answered, and smiled. He couldn’t see her eyes. On the polarized ski goggles, he could only see his own face -- rather sad and worn from his ordeal– but beneath, there was her mouth and the subtle show of teeth. It was rather too familiar.

Nonetheless, when she grabbed his hand and hauled him toward the door, he didn’t protest.

Overhead, he heard helicopters.

-=-=

Adalbjorg, whom Celegorm still fondly thought of Irissë, was regarding him as Aredhel once did: a little bit impatient and a little bit annoyed. She was in white, her hair cropped and her face obscured by makeup, but her eyes and that imperious turn of the mouth were always the same. He couldn’t believe that he had ever doubted that it must be her.

"You're not going to let me go," she said, tapping her foot on the polished floor.

"You know I can't," he said apologetically.

"You won't," she said flatly.

"Not this time.”

Aredhel nodded, sharply, once. Then she lowered her head, presenting demure eyelashes instead of the sharp glint of her eyes. Celegorm sighed.

“May I leave now?” she asked.

Celegorm opened the folder in front of him. The door hissed quietly open. The electronic beepings and chatterings briefly filled the silence. Then the sharp click of her heels faded into the distance before the door closed.

He still didn’t know how much Aredhel believed about what he told her about herself. But men and women in their profession had no identity. They didn’t exist. They could believe anything about themselves.

If Celegorm called Aredhel cousin and claimed that they met a long time ago? What of it? Aredhel, with her 21st century sensibilities and consummate professionalism, could afford to be indulgent to a man of his reputation. Yet forbidding her a mission explicitly given to her had only aroused her curiosity.

Celegorm could see it now: his carefully constructed world falling apart in a land of ice and snow even if Aredhel succeeded. The room was temperature controlled, but Celegorm shivered looking at the man whose photo appeared on the monitor. The quality of the surveillance was shoddy and he had only once met Aredhel’s dark husband, but there was nothing in his life so far that was a coincidence.

Never a proper craftman, he had always been too hasty and she had always been too willful. Fortune was fate for the Second Children. Doom for the First.

-=-=

Aredhel looked at the man she had rescued. He was staring back, his dark eyes almost unblinking under her gaze. EOL: End of the Line Inc.- the source of the series of disturbing articles about the corporate interests of the new undersea internet cables being constructed in the Atlantic and Pacific. No one knew his real name, or how he could know the details of the companies involved, but he flaunted the fortune he had made by his knowledge and gained the world's attention.

"By these facts," he had written, "we know the freedom promised by technology is not embraced and protected by the invisible hand, but imprisoned. That golden girdle is the tender mercy of the market. The whims of a mere hundred men are locking the door to our understanding of the world and thus, of our own present and future."

In a different age, he would be an anarchist. In this age, he was a publicity nightmare. And nightmares, Aredhel knew, tend to gain in substance with frequency.

The pseudonym was familiar enough and even his written sentiment stirred her memory, but in looks, he bore little resemblance to the husband Ty claimed she had had. He had called him “dark” in an uncharacteristic dismissive style. She respected Ty as one simply must respect a man who could look as he did and still be known as the most efficient and successful hunter a security company could employ for its clandestine objectives. Nonetheless, his fantasies for her were, for a lack of better word, unsettling, despite the surprising lack of lechery. She had no memory of a previous life, he said he knew her seven thousand years ago. She had a life expectancy of forty before settling behind a desk, he boasted that he would never age and neither would she.

She had thought that it simply must be an old-fashioned protective streak. The resemblance, familial or coincidental, was certainly pronounced though his hair was fair and hers dark. Then the dossier for EOL showed up and he wouldn’t speak of why he wouldn’t let her go, but Aredhel were good with patterns and logic puzzles and the last alternative, no matter how improbable, simply must be true.

"Why are you staring?" she asked the man sitting in front of her.

Eol, for the convenience of thought, since she cared little for his real name, seemed unflustered by the question. He had only looked at her in surprise the time she showed up then it had seemed that he forced all the emotions inward. He did not have a youthful face, there were subtle lines at the corner of his eyes and mouth, but it would be difficult to tell his age exactly.

“I wish to know of my kidnapper.”

“I didn’t kidnap you,” Aredhel said, indignant.

“Then you would tell me your name.”

“I did.”

Eol laughed. He had a raspy, low voice, and the vowels of a vagrant European. “It is not the first time I’ve been kidnapped, though the physical ordeal was unexpected. But of course, you know all that. You said, ‘again’, as if it was tiresome.”

“You heard that?”

“I’ve exceptionally fine hearing though you’re exceptionally quiet. Who do you belong to?”

Aredhel opened her mouth to protest that she belonged to no one but then Eol muttered ‘never mind, just don’t expect any secrets from me,’ and turned his head toward the window. There was a thin silvery scar on his forehead. Pseudonym or not, even his real name had not won him many friends. No one ever found out who fired the bullet.

“I don’t care for your secrets,” said Aredhel. “And you may call me Aredhel if you prefer. I merely wanted to see you.” She stopped, surprised at herself, though Eol was staring at her again.

“And what is so interesting about me that you tracked me down through a blizzard?”

“My assignment was not to rescue you at all.” That got his attention.

“Are you always so curious?” he asked her softly.

Aredhel hesitated. The costly necessities of living, of employing her skills and her looks where they were useful, of not getting killed, those were her mandates for as long as she could remember. Even the gentlemanly Tyelkormo had required her to exist in the shadows of rules and regulations and the understanding that qualifications were required before she could know more.

If they were ageless as he claimed, if they were family as he claimed, and even if she had once married this man whom she could only see as a familiar stranger and who knew her not at all, all her discontent unwrapped with this question. Unlike the man who created EOL, she had not been curious at all. The dreams-

The helicopter was landing.

“Who will be waiting for us?” Eol asked.

“Family,” she said.

-=-=

Eol did not much like Aredhel. She was beautiful and like all beautiful women he knew, troubled. Worse still, he had the horrifying idea that he could be the solution to all her troubles. Living alone for so long was clearly wrecking his sanity. He couldn't stop looking at her. The world grew quiet when she spoke. He tried to tell himself that it was only she was there in the right moment. A particularly vulnerable moment: all his blood was going to his head and imminent physical death on the horizon. He never liked to contemplate his mortality. He had chosen machines precisely because they were always developing never dying. Constructing the architecture for information had appealed to his sense of order and fairness.

There were others before him and there would be others after him, but they merely revealed information without cause. There had no philosophy, no sense of how malleable and how protective data could be both for the perpetrators of certain crimes and their victims.

At the moment, however, he was meeting Aredhel’s so called family, and utterly confused as to his status in the state of affairs.

The man whom Aredhel introduced as her “cousin” looked like he could break him with the hand he was holding out. Nevertheless, Eol shook it gamely, and suppressed his wince.

“You are Eol,” the blond man said. They were finally out of the wind. Eol had no idea what nation owned the ship they had landed on.

“That is only my name when-“

“That is your name,” the other man said. “It had never been a real name even while you knew him. Later on, we thought it came from a word of lament, but we are what we call ourselves and this, Eol, is end of the line.” The first half of the statement was directed to Aredhel who frowned. The second half Eol thought to be safer not to disagree though dread was tightening his skin.

“You have to understand, I don’t know who captured me so I’ll really appreciate it if you let me go. I don’t even know where we are. The United Nations-”

“You have no one to tell even if you do.”

“Exactly,” Eol said, defeated.

“Except I can’t let you go.”

“Why?”

“Because Aredhel will go with you.”

“But you don’t want Aredhel to leave,” Eol ventured, though it made no sense. These people must be spies, though he didn’t know who employed them, if any, or why Aredhel would find him so interesting and her cousin him to find him so distasteful and unworthy of interest. He couldn’t deny that her interest flattering, but his distaste seemed to be more sinister unless it was merely personal. There was no reason to suppose they were blood relations.

“Aredhel can come and leave as she likes but she can’t leave with you.”

“You won’t die if I’m with you, Eol.” Eol could hear the wind howling outside. Aredhel’s words seemed to come from a great distance though he could see her mouth open and close in front of him. “And you will satisfy my curiosity. Tell me how the world works.”

-=-=

Celegorm did not wage war but he was fighting a losing battle against a mere man, a man who was not even a mere shadow of what he was.

The world was ending in 2012. He had woken on the shores of an alpine lake, alone, his memories intact, Mandos’ words burnt into his memory. The Straight Road had changed course, but he had given chase anyways. The animal had been very small and very dark, only dawn illuminated it and so he had risen through the layers of sleep and centuries of dust, his body reconstructed as it was always meant to be, though perhaps not upon those shores upon those times.

Still, they were always meant to return at the remaking of the world. He knew little of the fates of the dark elves except that they fade. That they could fade into the guise of mortality he had never considered. The fea, he supposed, was still there. Eol should’ve never meet Aredhel because she, too, had awaken, though confused.

It was because one half of her soul was cleaved to him, Celegorm reminded himself bitterly. The title of wife was no mere title for the Noldor, though he supposed what remained of Eol in this insignificant trouble-maker could not even recognize that.

He had wanted this man to die. Then, too, Eol of Nan Elmoth might die, gone from this world as if he had never been and Aredhel’s soul free from his haunting and be herself again as Celegorm remembered her on the Blissed Shores.

In this language, in this time, he called it “our childhood.” Surely time, if they could return him his body would also return time to how it should’ve been.

“Do you believe in fate?” he asked Eol.

Eol, so wary and so tense, shook his head. He wore his body very heavily. Fatigue, hunger, and unhappiness showed clearly on his face.

“I do,” Celegorm informed him. “I think it is fate that you met Aredhel and that you met me.”

“Are you going to tell me that it is for some greater purpose? For whatever you’re doing?”

“No. I’m going to tell you that it is for a lesser purpose. A shameful one, really. A man of your intellect would understand the waste of having history repeating itself.”

“He’s not going to kill me,” Aredhel said.

“I’m not, what?” Eol looked between them, bewildered.

“He think you’ll be the death of me as you were once before.”

Eol looked at them as if they were mad. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he exclaimed. He stood abruptly. “I never will. Who are you people? Are you going to let me go?”

“Go where, Eol? I haven’t finished. In this fate, this world, neither of you are going to leave to wander the world.”

-=-=

For all Tyelkormo could claim to know about her, he didn't know one last very important thing about Aredhel: she believed the fantastic stories he wove about her life and who she was suppose to be because she didn't see herself in them. She was his dear cousin, her kingly brother's sister, a man's wife, and another's mother. It was a strange claim for kinship and closeness, cold in its way. She had been as she was now, invisible.

"If I get you out of here, will you take me with you?" she whispered, one hand pressed against Eol's mouth.

The man nodded.

"You do know me, don't you? You recognize who I am?"

"You don't need my help. You can go whereever you like, but you are coming with me to satisfy all your curiosity."

Aredhel was relieved. "Yes."

Eluding the guards would be easy. Tyelkormo would not harm her or compromise his own standing by declaring one of his own agents had gone rogue. He would have to hunt down them himself if he cared and Aredhel would make it a game for him, for eternity if necessary while she pieced her dreams together again in the safety of the shadows.

-=-=


End file.
